I have a supervisor!
Apr 14th, 2008 by Rebecca
There’s a piece of news I’ve been meaning to blog about for a few days: it seems that I’ve finally found an honours supervisor.
I’ve been planning for a while now to write my thesis on cissexual appropriation of trans identities, lives and experiences within queer and feminist theory. I’d always had the problem, however, that I was down a supervisor. I’d only ever had three lecturers which had been close to respectful with regard to trans issues: one was brilliant, but still a PhD candidate, one that the university extremely controversially let one go three years back, and the third I just wouldn’t want as a supervisor: nice woman, but occasionally prone to forays into bizarroworld in her theoretical stuff. This left me, well, a bit screwed.
However, I talked to the honours convenor a couple of months ago, and she suggested an academic from the research school side of the university. I was a little bit cynical, him being a white cissexual man who’d made a career of studying transpeople and gender variant people of colour, primarily those from Asia. So, anyway, she arranged for me to meet with him at a function last week, and to my surprise, I was really impressed. I don’t think I’ve ever come across an academic in the flesh who comes across as being quite so conscious of his own privilege, and of his responsibilities to treat those who he’s actually studying with respect. Amongst other things, he spoke of taking on other white academics for exoticising Asian LGBT folk, and supervising/helping get published a transperson he’d been working with in Thailand. He said that while Western transpeople weren’t really his area of expertise, he’d be very interested as long as I’d be prepared to help educate him some, to “let him be the student” as he put it.
After dealing with entitled idiots in nearly every semester since my degree, and after my last hope for a potential supervisor turned out to be a batshit raving ignorant tool, I couldn’t be more thrilled. I’ll be meeting with him sometime in the next couple of weeks to talk things over in a bit more detail and fix up the paperwork, but it seems as if I finally have a supervisor for next year. I’m really looking forward to the opportunity - and especially now I’ll be working with someone who seems to be both a) genuinely interested, and b) clueful.
Hey, that’s good news.
I’d guess, though, that I’d keep a slight bit of cynicism alive, just b/c people who we think are our allies for many reasons, turn out to be otherwise, as you’ve written recently.
cool! good luck! if it’s who i’m thinking it is, maybe you could speak to aren about him? i believe (i may be wrong) they’ve had dealings.
GallingGalla: Yeah, there’s always that. I’m inherently distrustful of cissexual academics who go anywhere near trans issues, but so far, this guy has impressed me, and that’s no easy feat.
Nix: Do you know what sort of contact they’ve had? I’m quite curious, given the above (if there’s anything I should know, I’d like to know it now) - although I don’t really know Aren myself, and I’d feel a bit weird approaching him out of the blue.
mostly positive, i think. i’ll send aren over.
I did get sent over! You should go for it, he’s excellent. (Email me if you want to talk more.)
Also, the ‘young kathoey‘ is a friend of mine… And would be rather amused to hear herself described as such
Az: just sent you an email.
sorry if i recollected what he’d said badly about that woman. *fixes post*. it’s beeen a looooong week.